With an ex-railway deposit station bathed entirely in red glow as the venue of Gucci’s  Men’s Fall/Winter 16 show, there certainly was an air of mystery. Creative Director Alessandro Michele titled the collection “Poetic Reactivation”. This is hardly surprising indeed, as the designer has shown us a fondness for philosophy, for last season’s collection was inspired by the work of French semiotician, literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes.

For the FW16 collection, his inspirations include German Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin, known for his 1936 work entitled The Work Of Art In the Age Of Mechanical Production, and French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work on assemblages. An amalgamation of these two academicians, the collection is about how the past has an impact on the present. And the ways in which both the past and the present fuse together, is through Memory, because in the act of remembering, we tend to usually remember the good (sometimes to a romanticised extent); the way we remember certain events are also impacted by our current selves in the present. As such, it is at once destructive (eliminating the bad) and liberating – while the past cannot be changed, we can look forward to a brighter, unexpected future. And we certainly see that in the classic bag silhouettes that Michele utilises, but onto which his new creative direction have been added – the florals, and bees, appliqué patches, and butterflies are fast becoming synonymous with the designer’s reign at Gucci.

Clothes, then, in referencing the past, become a surface onto which (new) meanings are ascribed, where seemingly fragmented pieces come together, and then detach from the original meaning to take on wholly new and unexpected meanings that are significant to the wearer. Michele is not just a designer, he is one who really utilises clothes as a symbol and mode of discourse, for revealing things unspoken.

* if you’re wondering why this blogpost sounds more complex than the usual blogposts you’re used to seeing/reading on the blog, it’s because my background is in the social sciences and these are theorists I’ve dealt with in my work, lol. =P

Images courtesy of Gucci